A Time for Hope and Action: The housing crisis in Maryland
by C. Matt Hill
“ … I ask you that you hear us. That you provide housing protections for the most vulnerable…”
-@CasaForAll member Cecilia
“My contract is expiring soon and I’m worried they’ll use that as a weapon to evict me.”
-@CasaForAll member Karla
“All my patients are either facing homelessness, housing instability, or overcrowded housing”
-Dr. Mihir Chaudhary, Baltimore Convention Center Field Hospital
Housing, health care, race, gender, and income inequality — no one could listen to the testimony in the Maryland House Judiciary Committee on February 17, 2021, and fail to recognize our collective failure to meet basic human needs during a global pandemic. As with many socio-economic problems, those with the least privilege are suffering the most. Perhaps the most dramatic examples of this are the widespread evictions taking place across Maryland. Minority communities and women are at particular risk of being evicted, as they earned less on average before the pandemic hit and were more likely to lose their jobs after it hit.
I am a lawyer for the non-profit Public Justice Center and a member of Renters United Maryland, and I’m working my hardest to support a package of housing-justice bills state legislators are expected to vote on soon. In my 12 years working on this issue I have yet to see proposals this strong until now. Passing these laws would make our state a more just society. The Housing Justice Package would stop evictions, provide rent relief and institute long-overdue structural changes in housing court.
Statistics abound to demonstrate the race equity consequences of this failure (36% of Black renter households are facing eviction compared to 14% of white households¹), the public health consequences (“Lifting eviction moratoriums translated to a total of 433,700 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths between March 1 and September 3, 2020²) , and the failure of the so-called eviction “moratorium” in Maryland (over 2,500 families evicted in Maryland from June to Nov, 2020³). As the illustration below demonstrates,⁴ housing and health care are inextricably linked, particularly during a pandemic:
At a time when being poor is treated as a crime and those in power have fallen silent, all might seem lost. But there is still hope. The simple answer is to support the Housing Justice Package, which would stop evictions, provide rent relief so landlords get paid, and create a more balanced housing court for landlords and tenants. Renters United Maryland (RUM), a coalition of Maryland tenants, organizers Senators Shelly Hettleman, Will Smith and Charles Sydnor and D, Delegates Wanika Fisher, Sandy Rosenberg, Vaughn Stewart, and Melissa Wells) have taken leadership in Annapolis. The Maryland House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones has centered race equity in a number of initiatives, and we’re excited to see the Speaker and House leadership embrace parts of the Housing Justice Package including
- providing for a right to counsel in some eviction cases
- increasing the eviction filing fee to incentivize landlords to negotiate with tenants before filing an eviction action
- requiring landlords to send a notice of past due rent before filing for an eviction
- allowing judges to stay evictions under certain circumstances.
However, significant questions remain:
- Will the General Assembly embrace a true eviction moratorium that prohibits evictions during the emergency and allows residents time to seek rent relief?
- Will the General Assembly close the massive “Tenant Holding Over” loophole in Governor Hogan’s eviction order? Because current protections do not cover a specific type of eviction case linked to lease non-renewal, landlords are flocking to file these eviction cases — 82%more filings than typical in one jurisdiction — to circumvent what limited protections do exist.
- Will the General Assembly ensure that tenants can readily seek a continuance or postponement of eviction trials for 10 days to seek legal or rental assistance?
- Will the General Assembly expand a right to counsel to all cases that could result in eviction?
- Will the General Assembly ensure that landlords do not pass on the filing fee increase to tenants?
These questions may sound like petty details, but they’re not. There is a cruel irony in the fact that the same Black and Latinx communities that have borne the brunt of infection/death from COVID-19 as our “essential workers,” are now the same communities whose residents are most at risk of homelessness. Will the General Assembly commit to answer these questions in a way that addresses the coming eviction tsunami and advances a human right to housing for all Maryland residents?
Now is the time for action. We look specifically to Speaker Adrienne Jones and President Bill Ferguson as well as Committee Chairs Luke Clippinger, Kumar Barve, and Will Smith and their committee members for leadership. We urge all Marylanders who recognize the intersection of housing with public health, race equity, income inequality, and environmental sustainability, to stand with us. Call, write, or tweet your state delegate and senator and urge them to support these bills.
The following was written by C. Matthew Hill, an attorney of the Public Justice Center at 201 N. Charles St., Suite 1200 in Baltimore, MD 21201
C¹ https://rentersunitedmaryland.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Eviction-Process-Overhaul-1-Pager.pdf
C² https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3736457
C⁴ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3736457
